Too Many Airplanes

Greta Thunberg was recently in the news because she decided to travel by

Greta Thunberg is sailing instead of flying.
Photo by Jan Ainali, c/o the Wiki Commons.

sailboat instead of airliner to attend a environmental event in New York. The point she wanted to highlight is the impact of the air industry on climate change. As such, she was following in the footsteps of Mohandas Gandhi who also sought to mobilize public opinion through his own personal behaviour. (That is why he wore a loin cloth and was often seen sitting at a spinning wheel making thread. He was suggesting that Indians should support their local craft industries instead of British imports.)

She has been taking heat over this by "the usual suspects" who feel threatened by the idea that people are taking too many flights around the world and that maybe we need to rethink this behaviour.

I've always been somewhat skeptical about the idea that it is a good thing to have hordes of people flying all over the place. Generally I keep my thoughts to myself, however, because that is such an unpopular viewpoint in my social milieu and I don't want to always be the guy who "puts the turd in the punch bowl". But having said that, I thought I'd give this story another look. And, unfortunately, this is one of those ones where a little research has shown things to be far worse than I originally suspected.

I looked into a fact sheet put out by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and it turns out that there were a jaw-dropping 4.4 billion discrete trips by an individual on an airplane in 2018. (This was one of those times where I did a lot of double and triple checking for the number---because I originally couldn't believe that it was true.) This resulted in 95 billion (US, I assume) gallons of fuel being burned, which released 905 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. 

This isn't a static number, either. It turns out that there was a 7.4 % increase in Revenue Passenger Kilometres (RPK) in 2018 over the year before. (This is a more useful term than just the number of fliers, because this adds in an idea of the length of the trip as well as the bare number.) This number has been going up by leaps and bounds---an average of 7% for each of the last six years. Just to put things in perspective, if we convert this 7% growth rate to a "doubling" number---using "the rule of 70"---we come up with a doubling of the air industry in only 10 years. Presumably that would mean that at the current rate of expansion air travel could result in 190 billion gallons of fuel burned and 1.8 billion tonnes of CO2 release in the year 2029. (I think Greta might be onto something here---.)

Statistics Canada has some numbers about what our nation is doing. Here's a graph of air travelers by year.

Another interesting factoid says that Canadians logged in 192.8 billion passenger kilometres in 2016, which was an astounding 9.5% increase from 2015. (If this seems odd given the above bar graph, remember that "passenger kilometres" measures the distance traveled. If the same number of people travel longer distances, the problem just got worse.)

Let's put this into a perspective. The IATA says that in 2016 the entire world logged in 3.8 billion trips, and---from the above Statistics Canada graph---Canadians logged in something like 80 million. In 2016 the world population was something like 7.4 billion and Canada's was 35 million. So Canada's share of trips by plane was 2.1% of the trips, even though we only had 0.47% of the world's population. Yet another example of Canada punching above it's weight on the world's stage!!!!

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I mentioned above that I'm not very popular with people when I talk about this

Mark Twain, photo by A.F. Bradley.
Public Domain c/o Wiki Commons.

sort of thing. I think that that's because it is an article of faith among baby boomers that "travel broadens".

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

Mark Twain

The problem with this quote is that it is total nonsense. The actual physical movement of a human being from place to place has zero influence on their mind. I first figured this out by talking to sailors. You might think that traveling around the world on a ship would help people learn about other cultures. In fact, for many of them just go to the nearest bar and stay there until it's time to ship off again. And how many people's idea of travel boils down to not much more than laying on a beach reading mystery novels and sucking down drinks with tiny paper umbrellas? Of course, there are exceptions. But those come from the individual, not the mere act of burning jet fuel and hurtling from one country to another at high speed.

A passing acquaintance with history will tell you that it's always been thus. Yes, there are folks who've had their minds broadened while traveling. But that says more about them than their months spend in a ship or on horseback. If this wasn't the case, what explains the hordes of "Colonel Blimps" who managed the colonial empires of the world? Or the missionaries who devoted their lives to spreading the blight of Western sexual hangups to "primitive peoples"? Shouldn't all these folks have had their "minds blown" by living in a totally different culture for extended periods of time? If "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness" where the Hell did all that Western "cultural imperialism" come from?

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How about we come up with a new and better quote for someone to use in this context?

The world has too many people travelling around trying to find a good place to visit---and not enough staying put to build a good place to live.

Frank De Jong, former leader of the Green Party of Ontario

Frank De Jong, with his favorite transportation device.
Photo by Shaun Merritt, c/o Wiki Commons.

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One last point.

When I mention the impact of any personal behaviour on the macro level, I am not suggesting that anyone who actually does this thing is evil. Nor am I saying that there is no solution unless everyone spontaneously changes their behaviour. No social issue every changes because people all individually stop choosing to do some particular act. Slavery, using ozone destroying chemicals, discrimination against gays, etc, all needed to be dealt with through government regulation.

But there is a relationship between what people personally choose to do, and what the government will eventually end up regulating. If almost everyone flies around the world on a regular basis---for business, family matters, tourism---politicians are going to avoid creating any sort of policy that will cut down on a voter's ability to do so. That means that at least some people have to be willing to start a debate about whether or not something is a good idea. And at least a visible minority of people have to be willing to change their minds about this sort of thing. If they don't, no politician with any hope of getting elected will ever be willing to take it on.

We need people like Greta Thornberg---who now has the public eye---to publicize this important issue. Unfortunately, a lot of the people I know who are leading the fight against climate change are also products of the "boomer generation" and accept as a rock-hard, totally not-to-be-debated, article of faith that "travel broadens the mind" and they adamantly refuse to even contemplate the idea that there should be some reduction in the amount of jet travel. Frankly, I'm appalled at the number of Greens, "climate activists", "progressive politicians", etc, who think nothing of flying all over the place to go on personal vacations or to conferences with marginal importance. This isn't because I think that they are "evil", or that they in particular are going to personally destroy the planet---but because the optics are horrible and it dramatically undermines their moral authority when it comes to advocating for policies aimed at lessening humanity's carbon footprint. And that weakens their ability to influence government policy.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!